One theory of linguistic information processing asserts that there is a preliminary incomplete analysis of linguistic information which lets people judge how difficult the information will be to process completely. The present study investigates the reliability and validity of such judgments of comprehensibility and discusses some of their…

Special issue on translation. (VM)

The linguist does not usually describe grammatical structures of stylized sentences because there are none well-formed on the surface. He could use rules for organizational and relational features of the grammar which affect the last lines of generation to produce deviant but acceptable linguistic forms, thereby increasing the predictive power of…

Describes a study that attempts to systematize the criteria required for accurate translations of technical documents. The results of a Linguistic Appreciation Questionnaire-Test, administered to 19 professional translators, were used to categorize the most common translation variables: style, structure, rhythm, and meaning of text in the hope of…

Attempts to apply the techniques and ideas of transformational grammar to the teaching of translation. A three-step procedure in which in the original text is reduced to based and embedded sentences, translated and reconstituted in the target language is outlined. Stylistic aspects of translation are also discussed. (FWB)

Two experiments indicating that children's linguistic generalizational biases change from a semantically-based system to a syntactical-structural system provide evidence for a semantic-relational bias in children's early grammars and support the notion that children's generalizational biases shift from a semantic-relational basis to a…

Certain word-order patterns are more basic and less marked than others. The more strongly marked a pattern seems to be in isolation, the stronger must be the contextual forces motivating its use, if it is to seem natural in a text. Various topicalizations (of adverbials, objects, and parts of verb phrases, for example) need various degrees of…

The source of syntactic ambiguity and facts concerning the resolution of such ambiguity are discussed in this paper. The attitude of qenerative linguists towards ambiguity is examined, and a working distinction is drawn between vaqueness and ambiguity. The consequences of this distinction are then examined for syntactic ambiguity and an ordering…

This volume accompanies and illustrates "Hierarchy and Universality of Discourse Constituents in New Guinea Languages: Discussion" (FL 003 513), which reports on research carried out in New Guinea and surrounding areas. This volume provides sample texts, over and beyond the fragmentary examples given in the discussion text. The examples…

The distinction between artifact and tool is introduced into the study of language diversity and the posting of linguistic universals. A complicating factor in all language investigations is the use of language as the chief tool to create new language. Analogy and metaphor are considered as two major creative forces at work in all languages.…